Threads, Loose Ends, Another Sculpture Is Possible
How contemporary sculpture is made, discussed, and interpreted—and how its complex material, spatial, situational, and thematic relationships are understood—are just starting points for the wide-ranging conversations that unfold within each studio at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. This event came together as an effort to gather some of these ongoing discourses and extend them beyond the internal framework of the Academy to a broader public. Each speaker has been invited by a different studio and its team, highlighting the diversity of perspectives represented.
Symposium Guests
Raymond Wladyslaw Barion and Harald Thys
Joëlle Tuerlinckx
Samia Henni
Henrike Naumann
Program
11 h
Lecture by Raymond Wladyslaw Barion and Harald Thys
Invited by the studio Art and Space | Installation, Prof. Nora Schultz
A Small History of the Machine
Using 10 elaborated examples throughout history, both artists sketch a portrait of the machine: The impossible machine, the fantastic machine, the idiotic machine, the imitating machine, the sabotage of the machine, etc.
Harald Thys’s works (1966, Wilrijk, Belgium), in collaboration with Jos de Gruyter (1965, Geel, Belgium), use a wide range of media, including video, painting, sculpture, and photography. There are bad jokes. And then, as the artists have pointed out, “there are things that are so bad they become a joke.” This is the treacherous territory de Gruyter and Thys explore and draw on to create work that manages to be at once unpalatable and absorbing. Their work has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions, including Kunstverein München; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; MoMA PS1, New York; Kunsthalle Wien; and Kunstverein Basel. They represented Belgium at the 58th Venice Biennale and have participated in others, such as the 5th Berlin Biennale and Manifesta 7, Trentino-Alto Adige.
Raymond Wladyslaw Barion: Born after 1980, I’m considered a digital native, someone who grew up with full access to the digital data stream, yet the art world is still very much composed of and oriented by digital immigrants (those born before 1980). This is visible through the decades-long repressive stance against digital art and is still palpable in most influential institutions and art academies. Very strange, as art has always been synonymous with technological development. Despite the many defining art movements and people, the world seems to willingly reject its mechanical/digital transition. In my work I try to work with these types of contradictions and phenomena from the past and present, using them as cornerstones for the foundation of my artistic practice.
13 h
Lecture by Joëlle Tuerlinckx
Invited by the studio Art and Intervention | Environment, Prof. Judith Huemer
Joëlle Tuerlinckx (*1958, lives and works in Brussels) is an artist whose works often pose as archival materials. Her visual vocabulary includes books, display cases, wall installations, video screens, and (not least) the exhibition rooms themselves. In her situation-specific presentations, she establishes relationships between simple things and found objects, texts, drawings, her own earlier works, and film material rich with intertextuality. Through the application of different methods of transformation and an infinite system of references and quotes, she lets us experience space and time, present and past, memory and immediacy—all on the same level. Tuerlinckx’s works are variable; they remain fixated only for a moment.
Tuerlinckx participated in Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017); Manifesta 10 in Saint Petersburg, Russia (2014); Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, Slovenia (2003); and Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany (2002). Important solo exhibitions include Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz (2024/25); Dia:Beacon – Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, New York (2018); Kunstmuseum Basel/Museum für Gegenwartskunst (2016); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2013); Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2012); Reina Sofia, Palacio de Cristal, Madrid (2009); Drawing Center, New York City (2006) and MAMCO, Geneva (2004). In 2018, she received an honorary doctorate from Hasselt University, Belgium, Faculty of Architecture and Arts.
14:30 h
Lunch intervention
Initiated by the Workshop for Molding and Casting and the Workshop for Analog and Digital Production
Two organisms enter into a relationship: Homo sapiens and fungi. According to biologist Merlin Sheldrake, the latter is closer to humans than to plants—not light-oriented, but nutrient-seeking; not self-contained, but interwoven with its environment. Whereas we absorb food, the fungus grows into it. This principle becomes the starting point for creative research: from mycelium, experimental pieces and exploratory objects are created for a dinner table. In this table setting, we encounter two aspects of the mushroom—material in the objects, and food as a mushroom goulash—shared in a meal.
Table for 2 was created as part of the special teaching project Mushroom Mycelium as a Material for Art, in collaboration with students from the Institute of Fine Arts, Institute for Art and Architecture, and the Institute for Conservation and Restoration.
15:30 h
Lecture by Samia Henni
Invited by the studio Art and Space | Spatial Strategies, Prof. Iman Issa
Samia Henni is a historian and exhibition maker of built, destroyed, and imagined environments and their relationship to the practices of colonization, war, and environmental contamination. Her most recent research has culminated in the exhibitions Psychocolonial Spaces (2025–; Bolzano), Performing Colonial Toxicity (2023–; Amsterdam, Zurich, London, Providence, Paris, Berlin, Ottawa), Housing Pharmacology (2020–21; Marseille, Paris), Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (2017–2022; Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, and Philadelphia), as well as in the books Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (EN, 2024, 2025; FR, 2025), Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (EN, 2017, 2022; FR, 2019), and the volumes Deserts Are Not Empty (EN, 2022, 2025; IT, 2024) and War Zones (2018), of which she was the editor.
She received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture (with distinction, ETH Medal) from ETH Zurich and has taught at Princeton University, ETH Zurich, Geneva University of Art and Design, the University of Zurich, and Cornell University. Currently, she teaches at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture.
17:30 h
Lecture by Henrike Naumann
Invited by the studio Art and Space | Object, Prof. Julian Göthe
Henrike Naumann was born in Zwickau (GDR) in 1984. She lives and works in Berlin.
Naumann reflects on socio-political problems at the level of design and interiors and explores the friction between opposing political opinions in dealing with taste and personal everyday aesthetics. In her immersive installations, she arranges furniture and objects, creating scenographic spaces into which she integrates video and sound works. Her practice reflects the mechanisms of radicalization and their connection to personal experience. Her artistic practice is accompanied by a wide range of lectures and interdisciplinary collaborations reflecting on the questions immanent in her work.
She has been awarded numerous prizes, and important exhibitions of her works include the Sculpture Center in New York, the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard, MoMA Warsaw, the Wall Memorial of the German Bundestag, as well as the Ghetto Biennale in Haiti and the Kyiv Biennale in Ukraine. Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu have been announced as the artists for the German Pavilion at the 61st Venice Art Biennale.
Henrike Naumann is a fellow at the Berlin Artistic Research Program 2024/25. She has accepted a professorship in sculpture at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts starting in 2026. She is currently researching the relationship between art and war.